Through the Eye of the Needle

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III

The tenement-house, such as it is, is the original of the
apartment-house, which perpetuates some of its most characteristic
features on a scale and in material undreamed of in the simple philosophy
of the inventor of the tenement-house. The worst of these features is
the want of light and air, but as much more space and as many more rooms
are conceded as the tenant will pay for. The apartment-house, however,
soars to heights that the tenement-house never half reached, and is
sometimes ten stories high. It is built fireproof, very often, and is
generally equipped with an elevator, which runs night and day, and makes
one level of all the floors. The cheaper sort, or those which have
departed less from the tenement-house original, have no elevators, but
the street door in all is kept shut and locked, and is opened only by the
tenant's latch-key or by the janitor having charge of the whole building.
In the finer houses there is a page whose sole duty it is to open and
shut this door, and who is usually brass-buttoned to one blinding effect
of livery with the elevator-boy. Where this page or hall-boy is found,
the elevator carries you to the door of any apartment you seek; where he
is not found, there is a bell and a speaking-tube in the lower entry, for
each apartment, and you ring up the occupant and talk to him as many
stories off as he happens to be. But people who can afford to indulge
their pride will not live in this sort of apartment-house, and the
rents in them are much lower than in the finer sort. The finer sort are
vulgarly fine for the most part, with a gaudy splendor of mosaic
pavement, marble stairs, frescoed ceilings, painted walls, and cabinet
wood-work. But there are many that are fine in a good taste, in the
things that are common to the inmates. Their fittings for housekeeping
are of all degrees of perfection, and, except for the want of light and
air, life in them has a high degree of gross luxury. They are heated
throughout with pipes of steam or hot water, and they are sometimes
lighted with both gas and electricity, which the inmate uses at will,
though of course at his own cost. Outside, they are the despair of
architecture, for no style has yet been invented which enables the artist
to characterize them with beauty, and wherever they lift their vast bulks
they deform the whole neighborhood, throwing the other buildings out of
scale, and making it impossible for future edifices to assimilate
themselves to the intruder.

There is no end to the apartment-houses for multitude, and there is no
street or avenue free from them. Of course, the better sort are to be
found on the fashionable avenues and the finer cross-streets, but others
follow the course of the horse-car lines on the eastern and western
avenues, and the elevated roads on the avenues which these have invaded.
In such places they are shops below and apartments above, and I cannot
see that the inmates seem at all sensible that they are unfitly housed in
them. People are born and married, and live and die in the midst of an
uproar so frantic that you would think they would go mad of it; and I
believe the physicians really attribute something of the growing
prevalence of neurotic disorders to the wear and tear of the nerves from
the rush of the trains passing almost momently, and the perpetual jarring
of the earth and air from their swift transit. I once spent an evening in
one of these apartments, which a friend had taken for a few weeks last
spring (you can get them out of season for any length of time), and as
the weather had begun to be warm, we had the windows open, and so we had
the full effect of the railroad operated under them. My friend had become
accustomed to it, but for me it was an affliction which I cannot give you
any notion of. The trains seemed to be in the room with us, and I sat as
if I had a locomotive in my lap. Their shrieks and groans burst every
sentence I began, and if I had not been master of that visible speech
which we use so much at home I never should have known what my friend was
saying. I cannot tell you how this brutal clamor insulted me, and made
the mere exchange of thought a part of the squalid struggle which is the
plutocratic conception of life; I came away after a few hours of it,
bewildered and bruised, as if I had been beaten upon with hammers.

Some of the apartments on the elevated lines are very good, as such
things go; they are certainly costly enough to be good; and they are
inhabited by people who can afford to leave them during the hot season
when the noise is at its worst; but most of them belong to people who
must dwell in them summer and winter, for want of money and leisure to
get out of them, and who must suffer incessantly from the noise I could
not endure for a few hours. In health it is bad enough, but in sickness
it must be horrible beyond all parallel. Imagine a mother with a dying
child in such a place; or a wife bending over the pillow of her husband
to catch the last faint whisper of farewell, as a train of five or six
cars goes roaring by the open window! What horror! What profanation!

IV

The noise is bad everywhere in New York, but in some of the finer
apartment-houses on the better streets you are as well out of it as you
can be anywhere in the city. I have been a guest in these at different
times, and in one of them I am such a frequent guest that I may be said
to know its life intimately. In fact, my hostess (women transact society
so exclusively in America that you seldom think of your host) in the
apartment I mean to speak of, invited me to explore it one night when I
dined with her, so that I might, as she said, tell my friends when I got
back to Altruria how people lived in America; and I cannot feel that I
am violating her hospitality in telling you now. She is that Mrs. Makely
whom I met last summer in the mountains, and whom you thought so strange
a type from the account of her I gave you, but who is not altogether
uncommon here. I confess that, with all her faults, I like her, and I
like to go to her house. She is, in fact, a very good woman, perfectly
selfish by tradition, as the American women must be, and wildly generous
by nature, as they nearly always are; and infinitely superior to her
husband in cultivation, as is commonly the case with them. As he knows
nothing but business, he thinks it is the only thing worth knowing, and
he looks down on the tastes and interests of her more intellectual life
with amiable contempt, as something almost comic. She respects business,
too, and so she does not despise his ignorance as you would suppose; it
is at least the ignorance of a business-man, who must have something in
him beyond her ken, or else he would not be able to make money as he
does.

With your greater sense of humor, I think you would be amused if you
could see his smile of placid self-satisfaction as he listens to our
discussion of questions and problems which no more enter his daily life
than they enter the daily life of an Eskimo; but I do not find it
altogether amusing myself, and I could not well forgive it, if I did not
know that he was at heart so simple and good, in spite of his
commerciality. But he is sweet and kind, as the American men so often
are, and he thinks his wife is the delightfulest creature in the world,
as the American husband nearly always does. They have several times asked
me to dine with them _en famille;_ and, as a matter of form, he
keeps me a little while with him after dinner, when she has left the
table, and smokes his cigar, after wondering why we do not smoke in
Altruria; but I can see that he is impatient to get to her in their
drawing-room, where we find her reading a book in the crimson light of
the canopied lamp, and where he presently falls silent, perfectly happy
to be near her. The drawing-room is of a good size itself, and it has a
room opening out of it called the library, with a case of books in it,
and Mrs. Makely's piano-forte. The place is rather too richly and densely
rugged, and there is rather more curtaining and shading of the windows
than we should like; but Mrs. Makely is too well up-to-date, as she would
say, to have much of the bric-a-brac about which she tells me used to
clutter people's houses here. There are some pretty good pictures on the
walls, and a few vases and bronzes, and she says she has produced a
greater effect of space by quelling the furniture--she means, having few
pieces and having them as small as possible. There is a little stand with
her afternoon tea-set in one corner, and there is a pretty writing-desk
in the library; I remember a sofa and some easy-chairs, but not too
many of them. She has a table near one of the windows, with books and
papers on it. She tells me that she sees herself that the place is kept
just as she wishes it, for she has rather a passion for neatness,
and you never can trust servants not to stand the books on their heads or
study a vulgar symmetry in the arrangements. She never allows them in
there, she says, except when they are at work under her eye; and she
never allows anybody there except her guests, and her husband after he
has smoked. Of course, her dog must be there; and one evening after her
husband fell asleep in the arm-chair near her, the dog fell asleep on
the fleece at her feet, and we heard them softly breathing in unison.
She made a pretty little mocking mouth when the sound first became
audible, and said that she ought really to have sent Mr. Makely out with
the dog, for the dog ought to have the air every day, and she had
been kept indoors; but sometimes Mr. Makely came home from business so
tired that she hated to send him out, even for the dog's sake, though he
was so apt to become dyspeptic. "They won't let you have dogs in some of
the apartment-houses, but I tore up the first lease that had that clause
in it, and I told Mr. Makely that I would rather live in a house all my
days than any flat where my dog wasn't as welcome as I was. Of course,
they're rather troublesome."

The Makelys had no children, but it is seldom that the occupants of
apartment-houses of a good class have children, though there is no clause
in the lease against them. I verified this fact from Mrs. Makely herself,
by actual inquiry, for in all the times that I had gone up and down in
the elevator to her apartment I had never seen any children. She seemed
at first to think I was joking, and not to like it, but when she found
that I was in earnest she said that she did not suppose all the families
living under that roof had more than four or five children among them.
She said that it would be inconvenient; and I could not allege the
tenement-houses in the poor quarters of the city, where children seemed
to swarm, for it is but too probable that they do not regard convenience
in such places, and that neither parents nor children are more
comfortable for their presence.

V

Comfort is the American ideal, in a certain way, and comfort is certainly
what is studied in such an apartment as the Makelys inhabit. We got to
talking about it, and the ease of life in such conditions, and it was
then she made me that offer to show me her flat, and let me report to the
Altrurians concerning it. She is all impulse, and she asked, How would I
like to see it _now?_ and when I said I should be delighted, she
spoke to her husband, and told him that she was going to show me through
the flat. He roused himself promptly, and went before us, at her bidding,
to turn up the electrics in the passages and rooms, and then she led the
way out through the dining-room.

"This and the parlors count three, and the kitchen here is the fourth
room of the eight," she said, and as she spoke she pushed open the door
of a small room, blazing with light and dense with the fumes of the
dinner and the dish-washing which was now going on in a closet opening
out of the kitchen.

She showed me the set range, at one side, and the refrigerator in an
alcove, which she said went with the flat, and, "Lena," she said to the
cook, "this is the Altrurian gentleman I was telling you about, and I
want him to see your kitchen. Can I take him into your room?"

The cook said, "Oh yes, ma'am," and she gave me a good stare, while Mrs.
Makely went to the kitchen window and made me observe that it let in the
outside air, though the court that it opened into was so dark that one
had to keep the electrics going in the kitchen night and day. "Of course,
it's an expense," she said, as she closed the kitchen door after us. She
added, in a low, rapid tone, "You must excuse my introducing the cook.
She has read all about you in the papers--you didn't know, I suppose,
that there were reporters that day of your delightful talk in the
mountains, but I had them--and she was wild, when she heard you were
coming, and made me promise to let her have a sight of you somehow. She
says she wants to go and live in Altruria, and if you would like to take
home a cook, or a servant of any kind, you wouldn't have much trouble.
Now here," she ran on, without a moment's pause, while she flung open
another door, "is what you won't find in every apartment-house, even very
good ones, and that's a back elevator. Sometimes there are only stairs,
and they make the poor things climb the whole way up from the basement,
when they come in, and all your marketing has to be brought up that way,
too; sometimes they send it up on a kind of dumb-waiter, in the cheap
places, and you give your orders to the market-men down below through a
speaking-tube. But here we have none of that bother, and this elevator is
for the kitchen and housekeeping part of the flat. The grocer's and the
butcher's man, and anybody who has packages for you, or trunks, or that
sort of thing, use it, and, of course, it's for the servants, and they
appreciate not having to walk up as much as anybody."

"Oh yes," I said, and she shut the elevator door and opened another a
little beyond it.

"This is our guest chamber," she continued, as she ushered me into a very
pretty room, charmingly furnished. "It isn't very light by day, for it
opens on a court, like the kitchen and the servants' room here," and with
that she whipped out of the guest chamber and into another doorway across
the corridor. This room was very much narrower, but there were two small
beds in it, very neat and clean, with some furnishings that were in
keeping, and a good carpet under foot. Mrs. Makely was clearly proud of
it, and expected me to applaud it; but I waited for her to speak, which
upon the whole she probably liked as well.

"I only keep two servants, because in a flat there isn't really room for
more, and I put out the wash and get in cleaning-women when it's needed.
I like to use my servants well, because it pays, and I hate to see
anybody imposed upon. Some people put in a double-decker, as they call
it--a bedstead with two tiers, like the berths on a ship; but I think
that's a shame, and I give them two regular beds, even if it does crowd
them a little more and the beds have to be rather narrow. This room has
outside air, from the court, and, though it's always dark, it's very
pleasant, as you see." I did not say that I did not see, and this
sufficed Mrs. Makely.

"Now," she said, "I'll show you _our_ rooms," and she flew down the
corridor towards two doors that stood open side by side and flashed into
them before me. Her husband was already in the first she entered, smiling
in supreme content with his wife, his belongings, and himself.

"This is a southern exposure, and it has a perfect gush of sun from
morning till night. Some of the flats have the kitchen at the end, and
that's stupid; you can have a kitchen in any sort of hole, for you can
keep on the electrics, and with them the air is perfectly good. As soon
as I saw these chambers, and found out that they would let you keep a
dog, I told Mr. Makely to sign the lease instantly, and I would see to
the rest."

She looked at me, and I praised the room and its dainty tastefulness to
her heart's content, so that she said: "Well, it's some satisfaction to
show you anything, Mr. Homos, you are so appreciative. I'm sure you'll
give a good account of us to the Altrurians. Well, now we'll go back to
the pa--drawing-room. This is the end of the story."

"Well," said her husband, with a wink at me, "I thought it was to be
continued in our next," and he nodded towards the door that opened from
his wife's bower into the room adjoining.

"Why, you poor old fellow!" she shouted. "I forgot all about _your_
room," and she dashed into it before us and began to show it off. It was
equipped with every bachelor luxury, and with every appliance for health
and comfort. "And here," she said, "he can smoke, or anything, as long as
he keeps the door shut. Oh, good gracious! I forgot the bath-room," and
they both united in showing me this, with its tiled floor and walls and
its porcelain tub; and then Mrs. Makely flew up the corridor before us.
"Put out the electrics, Dick!" she called back over her shoulder.

VI

When we were again seated in the drawing-room, which she had been so near
calling a parlor, she continued to bubble over with delight in herself
and her apartment. "Now, isn't it about perfect?" she urged, and I had to
own that it was indeed very convenient and very charming; and in the
rapture of the moment she invited me to criticise it.

"I see very little to criticise," I said, "from your point of view; but I
hope you won't think it indiscreet if I ask a few questions?"

She laughed. "Ask anything, Mr. Homos! I hope I got hardened to your
questions in the mountains."

"She said you used to get off some pretty tough ones," said her husband,
helpless to take his eyes from her, although he spoke to me.

"It is about your servants," I began.

"Oh, of course! Perfectly characteristic! Go on."

"You told me that they had no natural light either in the kitchen or
their bedroom. Do they never see the light of day?"

The lady laughed heartily. "The waitress is in the front of the house
several hours every morning at her work, and they both have an afternoon
off once a week. Some people only let them go once a fortnight; but I
think they are human beings as well as we are, and I let them go every
week."

"But, except for that afternoon once a week, your cook lives in
electric-light perpetually?"

"Electric-light is very healthy, and it doesn't heat the air!" the lady
triumphed, "I can assure you that she thinks she's very well off; and so
she is." I felt a little temper in her voice, and I was silent, until she
asked me, rather stiffly, "Is there any _other_ inquiry you would
like to make?"

"Yes," I said, "but I do not think you would like it."

"Now, I assure you, Mr. Homos, you were never more mistaken in your life.
I perfectly delight in your naivete. I know that the Altrurians don't
think as we do about some things, and I don't expect it. What is it you
would like to ask?"

"Well, why should you require your servants to go down on a different
elevator from yourselves?"

"Why, good gracious!" cried the lady.--"aren't they different from us in
_every_ way? To be sure, they dress up in their ridiculous best when
they go out, but you couldn't expect us to let them use the _front_
elevator? I don't want to go up and down with my own cook, and I
certainly don't with my neighbor's cook!"

"Yes, I suppose you would feel that an infringement of your social
dignity. But if you found yourself beside a cook in a horse-car or other
public conveyance, you would not feel personally affronted?"

"No, that is a very different thing. That is something we cannot control.
But, thank goodness, we can control our elevator, and if I were in a
house where I had to ride up and down with the servants I would no
more stay in it than I would in one where I couldn't keep a dog. I should
consider it a perfect outrage. I cannot understand you, Mr. Homos! You
are a gentleman, and you must have the traditions of a gentleman,
and yet you ask me such a thing as that!"

I saw a cast in her husband's eye which I took for a hint not to press
the matter, and so I thought I had better say, "It is only that in
Altruria we hold serving in peculiar honor."

"Well," said the lady, scornfully, "if you went and got your servants
from an intelligence-office, and had to look up their references, you
wouldn't hold them in very much honor. I tell you they look out for their
interests as sharply as we do for ours, and it's nothing between us but a
question of--"

"Business," suggested her husband.

"Yes," she assented, as if this clinched the matter.

"That's what I'm always telling you, Dolly, and yet you _will_ try
to make them your friends, as soon as you get them into your house. You
want them to love you, and you know that sentiment hasn't got anything
to do with it."

"Well, I can't help it, Dick. I can't live with a person without trying
to like them and wanting them to like me. And then, when the ungrateful
things are saucy, or leave me in the lurch as they do half the time, it
almost breaks my heart. But I'm thankful to say that in these hard times
they won't be apt to leave a good place without a good reason."

"Are there many seeking employment?" I asked this because I thought it
was safe ground.

"Well, they just stand around in the office as _thick!_" said the
lady. "And the Americans are trying to get places as well as the
foreigners. But I won't have Americans. They are too uppish, and they are
never half so well trained as the Swedes or the Irish. They still expect
to be treated as one of the family. I suppose," she continued, with a
lingering ire in her voice, "that in Altruria you do treat them as one of
the family?"

"We have no servants, in the American sense," I answered, as
inoffensively as I could.

Mrs. Makely irrelevantly returned to the question that had first provoked
her indignation. "And I should like to know how much worse it is to have
a back elevator for the servants than it is to have the basement door for
the servants, as you always do when you live in a separate house?"

"I should think it was no worse," I admitted, and I thought this a good
chance to turn the talk from the dangerous channel it had taken. "I wish,
Mrs. Makely, you would tell me something about the way people live in
separate houses in New York."

She was instantly pacified. "Why, I should be delighted. I only wish my
friend Mrs. Bellington Strange was back from Europe; then I could show
you a model house. I mean to take you there, as soon as she gets home.
She's a kind of Altrurian herself, you know. She was my dearest friend at
school, and it almost broke my heart when she married Mr. Strange, so
much older, and her inferior in every way. But she's got his money now,
and oh, the good she does do with it! I know you'll like each other, Mr.
Homos. I do wish Eva was at home!"

I said that I should be very glad to meet an American Altrurian, but that
now I wished she would tell me about the normal New York house, and what
was its animating principle, beginning with the basement door.

She laughed and said, "Why, it's just like any other house!"

VII

I can never insist enough, my dear Cyril, upon the illogicality of
American life. You know what the plutocratic principle is, and what the
plutocratic civilization should logically be. But the plutocratic
civilization is much better than it should logically be, bad as it is;
for the personal equation constantly modifies it, and renders it far less
dreadful than you would reasonably expect. That is, the potentialities of
goodness implanted in the human heart by the Creator forbid the
plutocratic man to be what the plutocratic scheme of life implies. He is
often merciful, kindly, and generous, as I have told you already, in
spite of conditions absolutely egotistical. You would think that the
Americans would be abashed in view of the fact that their morality is
often in contravention of their economic principles, but apparently they
are not so, and I believe that for the most part they are not aware of
the fact. Nevertheless, the fact is there, and you must keep it in mind,
if you would conceive of them rightly. You can in no other way account
for the contradictions which you will find in my experiences among them;
and these are often so bewildering that I have to take myself in hand,
from time to time, and ask myself what mad world I have fallen into, and
whether, after all, it is not a ridiculous nightmare. I am not sure that,
when I return and we talk these things over together, I shall be able to
overcome your doubts of my honesty, and I think that when I no longer
have them before my eyes I shall begin to doubt my own memory. But for
the present I can only set down what I at least seem to see, and trust
you to accept it, if you cannot understand it.

Perhaps I can aid you by suggesting that, logically, the Americans should
be what the Altrurians are, since their polity embodies our belief that
all men are born equal, with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness; but that illogically they are what the Europeans are, since
they still cling to the economical ideals of Europe, and hold that men
are born socially unequal, and deny them the liberty and happiness which
can come from equality alone. It is in their public life and civic life
that Altruria prevails; it is in their social and domestic life that
Europe prevails; and here, I think, is the severest penalty they must pay
for excluding women from political affairs; for women are at once the
best and the worst Americans: the best because their hearts are the
purest, the worst because their heads are the idlest. "Another
contradiction!" you will say, and I cannot deny it; for, with all their
cultivation, the American women have no real intellectual interests, but
only intellectual fads; and while they certainly think a great deal, they
reflect little, or not at all. The inventions and improvements which
have made their household work easy, the wealth that has released them in
such vast numbers from work altogether, has not enlarged them to the
sphere of duties which our Altrurian women share with us, but has left
them, with their quickened intelligences, the prey of the trivialities
which engross the European women, and which have formed the life of the
sex hitherto in every country where women have an economical and social
freedom without the political freedom that can alone give it dignity and
import. They have a great deal of beauty, and they are inconsequently
charming; I need not tell you that they are romantic and heroic, or that
they would go to the stake for a principle, if they could find one, as
willingly as any martyr of the past; but they have not much more
perspective than children, and their reading and their talk about reading
seem not to have broadened their mental horizons beyond the old sunrise
and the old sunset of the kitchen and the parlor.

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